Tim Risher plans to release an album of collaborations early next year, and a couple of these will be with me - Still Morning is one we've completed, and we're working on another right now.

So he recently sent me a WAV - we usually start by tossing back and forth raw material for a while - and asked me if I could recognize the source:

"Dreaming" - Tim Risher & Tom DePlonty (fragment)

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I didn't, and I think he enjoyed telling me it was a warped fragment from my own piece "Corridor".

It's appropriate that Tim should be recycling it, because "Corridor" is itself based on a musical idea I stole from him:

Tim has used similar figures - along with a variety of tricks based on expanding, contracting, or abruptly changing the figure length, which I also cheerfully appropriated - in the piano parts of a number of his pieces.

The music on Corridor, which was written between 2009 and 2010, combines material composed using musical processes and games - different ways of building up, breaking down, transforming and juxtaposing patterns - with improvised passages. Sometimes improvisation is used for raw material. For example, "In rain and light" is composed by looping and juxtaposing fragments drawn from one short passage in a piano improvisation. Other pieces are wholly or partially improvised, using a musical process or game for guidance, or as a foil.

These pieces are connected to a breadth of minimal and ambient music that I love, and sometimes also to the canons and melodies of children's music. Since I am a pianist, pianos (more or less warped) often appear as characters. And the music is generally very quiet. In fact, two of the tracks ("Sleeping monsters lie" and "Zen baby") are lullabies - and those are the ones with the drums.

This album is dedicated to the memory of my friend, the composer Marc Gaspard.

I’m always intrigued by the chemistry between artists, particularly in this sub-genre where solo acts are the norm. Gnosis stands as a tribute to the enduring shared passions of Mssrs. Risher, DePlonty, Baker and Stanley, and offers a lot of good listening.

I'm fond of the musical device augmentation: stretching out a sequence of rhythmic values, or harmonies, or a melody, over increasingly long periods of time. For "Corridor", I stole a figure, especially well-suited to this treatment, from Tim Risher. (It's the basis of the quick electric piano line that starts about twenty seconds in.) Tim has used similar figures, along with a repertoire of tricks that involve expanding and contracting them, slowly or abruptly - which I also appropriated - in the keyboard parts of a number of his pieces. In the last section, these figures are combined with fragments of the shape-note hymn "Idumea": Tim introduced me the hymn, too (and shape-note music in general). It's only fitting that "Corridor" is dedicated to him.

Paragaté is a project started in the late 80s by the composer Tim Risher, to make music in collaboration with other composers and musicians. Gnosis, a selection of tracks by Paragaté spanning more than twenty years, includes contributions from Tim, Ted Stanley, Charles Baker, and me. Check it out!

On the album Corridor. This piece borrows a couple of licks from the melody of the song "Monsters Slapen Nooit" ("Monsters never sleep"), by the Dutch pop group Bløf.

The picture is of an arch at the entrance to Max Euweplein (Max Euwe Square) in Amsterdam. (Euwe was a Dutch grandmaster, the fifth World Champion of chess). The inscription reads "HOMO SAPIENS NON URINAT IN VENTUM".

One afternoon I was working on music, which wasn't going well, and to loosen up, I recorded a few minutes of piano improvisation. Cleaning up files a few months later, I stumbled on the improvisation again, and started to play with it. I found that parts of it sounded good in loops, and that some of those loops worked well overlaid on one another, in canon; this piece was written quickly after that.